In a Lonely Place
Alternate title(s):
Foreign Title:
Date: January 01, 1950 to December 31, 1950
Dates Note: 1950
Country of Origin:
United States
Place of Origin: United States
Languages:
Color: B&W
Silent: No
Based On: the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, adapted by Edmund H. North
Additional Info:
Curator Notes
Film Series/Exhibition Title:
Band of Outsiders: Women Crime WritersDescription:
Ray must have been after the corrosive core of doubt and mistrust at the center of Dorothy B. Hughes’s most pathological novel (1947) when he took on Andrew Solt’s terrific adaptation. Hughes’s riveting story about Dix Steele, a serial killer trolling the streets of Los Angeles for women, was discarded like one of the novel’s many victims. Still, this repurposing of Dix (Humphrey Bogart) as a faltering Hollywood scriptwriter with anger management problems churns up the same unsettling suspicions for those around him. Dix falls deeply for his neighbor (Gloria Grahame), and Ray plays his bipolar moods off of each other, a brand of wracked romance that is equal measures love and fear.
Film Series/Exhibition Title:
On Dangerous Ground: The Cinema of Nicholas RayDescription:
Ray delivers a truly grown-up view of love—and of Hollywood—in this bitter, tender, and devastating film. Humphrey Bogart stars as Dixon Steele, a screenwriter whose violent contempt has many targets: industry "popcorn salesmen," the moviegoing public, his own lovers. When Dix becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation, his neighbor Laurel (Gloria Grahame) provides an alibi, an inauspicious beginning to an ill-fated romance. In Dorothy Hughes's novel, Dix was in fact a murderer; in the final film he is "only" a troubled man. Yet in the end, as Laurel says with knowing sadness, it doesn't matter at all.
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